ABOUT THE BOOK A few diets work for a few people, but they rarely provide long-term solutions because they don't address why our relationship with food has broken down, causing the weight gain that creates the new problem of weight loss. If diets really worked, they wouldn't need continuous reinvention. They don't work because they are regimes that dictate what you eat, how much you eat, and in many cases when to eat, which is imposing unnatural control on a natural organism - your body. Ruth Owen wasted ten years of her young life on and off diets. All she had to show for it was a weight gain of three stone and an eating disorder, and so further despair and confusion. Then she made a small but significant discovery that helped her to piece together the puzzle of why the gaining and losing of weight has become such a major, and increasingly bizarre problem in the 21st Century. Since restoring a healthy relationship with food - which automatically brings eating control - she has maintained a normal body size (UK 8/10) for twenty years, without the assistance of diets, drugs, or deprivations. Having observed the diet industry getting fatter, along with its followers, she has now decided to try to help people to understand why they get into such a mess with their own bodies and, most importantly, to realise that weight loss is not the torturous, complicated process that we are being led to believe. All you have to do is retrace the steps of your eating history that have damaged your perception of food and created your eating problem. Then you must be brave enough to let go of the dieting delusions and dogma that surround weight loss, and learn to trust your body again. There is no willpower required - that's a promise - weight loss is not about discipline, it is about simple decisions made in consultation with your body.